“Call me when you’ve put that thing away, V.I. I can overcome my terror of the rhinovirus, but a gun is a total antiaphrodisiac.”

CHANGEUP

When I finally woke up, a little after nine, my clogged sinuses were putting painful pressure on my sore eye—not to mention my broken nose. I wanted to take enough sleeping pills to put me under until at least my cold had passed, if not until every member of the Guzzo family died, but I forced myself to my feet.

My face in the bathroom mirror would have done Picasso proud: the left side held a creative mix of yellows, purples and greens. Just as well the Smith & Wesson had driven Jake away last night: Romeo would have vanished without a single metaphor if Juliet had appeared on her balcony looking like this.

While my espresso machine heated up, I huddled over a ginger steam pot. After fifteen minutes of that, and a few shots of caffeine, I didn’t look any more beautiful, but my left eye was working; I would make it through the day.

I went down to the ground floor where Mr. Contreras was feeding Bernie his staple comfort breakfast of French toast. She agreed to a walk over to the lake with me and the dogs. She chatted about Northwestern’s hockey camp, wondering if it had been a mistake to commit to their program without seeing Syracuse and Ithaca.

My gun was in my tuck holster inside my jeans waistband. As we walked along Belmont, I wondered how much of the rest of the city was armed. I didn’t blame Jake for hating guns; they make you twitchy, make you see the world around you as dangerous, as if you wanted an excuse to pull your weapon and fire.

Every half block or so, I’d pull Bernie and the dogs into an alley or doorway to see whether the same people were around us, and if they, too, were halting. Bernie made a few scornful remarks about imaginary Uzbeks, but when we returned home, she assured me she would spend the day pulling her things together for her return to Canada.

“Is this one of your things?” I held out the coaster from Weeghman’s Whales.

“Oh!” She turned red and stuffed it into her backpack. “I went there with friends the other night. I am eighteen, you know, or at least, I will be in five weeks!”

“Darling, the legal drinking age may be eighteen in Quebec, but here in Illinois it’s twenty-one. Don’t tempt the fates again, okay?”

She accepted the reprimand without argument, to my surprise, just gave me a puckish smile and announced she was going to use my bathroom before she went back to Mr. Contreras. “Your tub is so big, I love lying in it.”

I hoped she couldn’t get in trouble in a midday bath, because I needed to go to my office. Although it was Saturday, I was too far behind in my work to stay home with her.

I resolutely put the Guzzo-Bagby-Scanlon world out of my mind while I caught up on client business. Murray called as I was crossing Milwaukee for a coffee. He was exuberant, taking the e-mail I’d sent him yesterday about Hurlihey’s involvement in Virejas Tower as a sign that we were once again best friends forever.

“What do you have on Spike that you’re keeping to yourself, Warshawski? You know this environmental exception only looks serious if you live in Vermont or Oregon.”

“Nothing, Murray, just fishing in very murky waters.”

“Come on, Warshawski, something’s going on: I read the police reports, and I know you tangled with Insane Dragons the other night. I know Spike comes from the same slagheap you do, so if you’ve been digging up skeletons in the land of your youth, tell me now, while I still feel I owe you one. If you sit on the story too long, I’m going to be peevish and make you look bad on air.”

“Spike didn’t come from my slagheap—he was across the Calumet on the East Side, back when that was the tony part of Steel City,” I objected.

I put him on hold while I ordered a cortado. My frustrations with Murray, for letting himself look ridiculous on cable TV, or for trying to pretend he wasn’t fifty by dating women half his age, were outweighed by our long years of working together.

He was still on the line when I came back. “There’s no novel, Murray, at least not yet, but there are a whole lot of unconnected chapters.”

I gave him a thumbnail. The number of names and relationships were so complicated Murray decided he needed to see my reports firsthand. As a further sign of renewed friendship, we agreed to meet at the Golden Glow around seven.

Thinking about the control Spike had over the legislature made my head ache again. In my own lifetime, four Illinois governors have gone to prison for fraud. As has the mayor of Cicero, numerous Cook County judges, Chicago aldermen, and state and federal representatives. What a place. Maybe I should move to Vermont or Oregon, where people are still shocked by violations of the public trust, and are willing to take action to stop them. Moving would also get me far away from the Cubs. I couldn’t see a downside.

Back in my office, I had an alert on my computer, reminding me that I owed one of my regular clients a report on an internal auditor suspected of skimming. Senior staff were meeting on Saturday so they could get together without alerting the suspected auditor. The company had let me insert keystroke software into the suspected skimmer’s computer, which showed him sending a penny on every hundred dollars to an account in Liechtenstein. I took a heavy-duty decongestant and was pulling together the final report—with ten minutes to get it to the client—when Stella Guzzo phoned.

I stared at the caller ID in disbelief, but let the call go to voice mail while I did a final proofread and e-mailed the report to the client. We were handling the meeting via videoconferencing, so I got myself hooked up to the meeting room before playing Stella’s message.

“You need to come to South Chicago this afternoon to see me.” The recording accentuated the harshness in her deep voice.

My impulse was to phone her back, but I thought of all the changes she and Frank—and Betty—had been putting me through. She could summon me, and then have me arrested for violating the restraining order. I copied the message and e-mailed it to my lawyer’s office.

Is there some way to find out what she wants? Is she vacating the r.o.? Going into a meeting; will call back in an hour.

I sat through the meeting in profile, good eye to the camera, answering questions more or less on autopilot, trying to imagine what Stella wanted. When I’d finally fielded the last of the financial VP’s questions—he kept asking the same thing, hoping for a different answer—I checked my messages.

Freeman Carter had called to say that the restraining order was still in place. “Her lawyer is doing a very annoying dance. The short answer is don’t go near the Guzzo family until I tell you I’ve got a document signed by a judge lifting the order. Call or e-mail me to confirm that you will not go down there.”

The urge to drive to Stella’s house, to burst in on her and turn her house inside out, was strong, but even more than dismembering Stella, I wanted to sleep. I called Freeman to confirm that I was following his advice. Between the decongestant, the injuries and the pain meds, I could barely keep my eyes open. I staggered to the cot in my back room and was asleep almost before I was horizontal.

The phone dragged me awake an hour later. It was Natalie Clements, the young woman in the Cubs media relations department.

I felt drugged, but Natalie was bright and peppy and delivered a breathless monologue. “Your name came up last night when Mr. Drechen and I went to visit his old boss. Mr. Villard is the gentleman who had the pictures we showed you of your cousin. The day after our press release, his house was broken into and somebody stole a lot of his photographs. They took Billy Williams’s first home run ball, oh, a lot of treasures. It’s horrible—they’re his memories!